The Islamization of Britain in 2015

by Soeren Kern

• Hospitals across Britain are dealing with at least 15 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) every day. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1984, there has not been a single conviction.
• At least 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 in the town of Rotherham, mostly by Muslim gangs, but police and municipal officials failed to tackle the problem because they feared being branded “racist” or “Islamophobic.”
• Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s in Waterloo, central London, allowed a full Muslim prayer service to be held in his church. He also asked his congregation to praise “the God that we love, Allah.”
• There has been a 60% increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police over the past four years, according to official figures.
• British intelligence are monitoring more than 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks in Britain.
• A Muslim worker at a nuclear power plant in West Kilbride, Scotland, was removed from the premises after he was caught studying bomb-making materials while on the job.
• “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist.” – Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic.

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2015 to become around 5.5% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.

Islam and Islam-related issues were omnipresent in Britain during 2015, and can be categorized into five broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists in Syria and Iraq; 2) the continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) the sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; 4) Muslim integration into British society; and 5) the failures of British multiculturalism.

JANUARY 2015

January 7. The British-born Islamic extremist, Anjem Choudary defended the jihadist attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. In an opinion article published by USA Today, Choudary wrote:

“Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

“In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Mohammed are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?”

January 9. Muslim cleric Mizanur Rahman of Palmers Green, north London, also defended the attacks in Paris and declared that “Britain is the enemy of Islam.” Speaking to an audience in London — his speech was also streamed online to thousands of his followers — Rahman said the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were guilty of “insulting Islam” and therefore “they can’t expect a different result.” He added: “You know what happens when you insult Mohammed.”

January 14. Zack Davies, 25, attacked a 24-year-old Sikh named Sarandev Bhambra with a machete at a Tesco supermarket in Mold, north Wales. British newspapers initially portrayed the attack as a “racially-motivated attempt” by a right-wing extremist promoting “white power.” It later emerged that Davies is actually a Muslim convert who goes by the name Zack Ali. On the morning of the attack, Davies warned on his Facebook page of his impending assault, posting four verses from the Koran that call for violence against non-Muslims.

January 16. Rahin Aziz, an Islamist from Luton, was pictured in Syria brandishing an AK-47 rifle. In a tweet, Aziz, who also calls himself Abu Abdullah al-Britani, wrote: “Still deciding to what to do with my #british passport, could burn it, flush it down the toilet, I mean realistically its not worth spitting on.”

January 16. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles sent a letter to more than 1,000 imams across Britain asking for their help in fighting extremism and rooting out those who are preaching hatred. Muslim groups responded by accusing the British government of stoking “Islamophobia” and demanding an apology.

January 17. The Telegraph reported that a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist with close links to the jihadist attacks in Paris cannot be deported from Britain because it would breach his human rights. Baghdad Meziane, a 49-year-old British-Algerian, jailed for eleven years in 2003 for running a terror network recruiting jihadists and fundraising for al-Qaeda, was released from prison five years early and allowed to return to his family home in Leicester. Since then, Meziane has successfully thwarted attempts to deport him, despite the government’s repeated insistence that he constitutes “a danger to the United Kingdom.”

According to The Telegraph, a close associate of Meziane, Djamel Beghal, mentored at least two of the suspected gunmen responsible for the killings — Amedy Coulibaly and Chérif Kouachi — while they were together in prison. Beghal’s wife, a French citizen, is living in the UK, courtesy of British taxpayers. Sylvie Beghal lives rent-free in a four-bedroom house in Leicester. She came to Britain with her children in search of a more “Islamic environment,” after deciding that France was too anti-Muslim.

January 20. The former chief of MI6, Sir John Sawers, in what can be seen as a recommendation for self-censorship, warned Britons not to insult Islam if they want to avoid Islamic terrorists from striking inside the country. He said:

“If you show disrespect for others’ core values then you are going to provoke an angry response… There is a requirement for restraint from those of us in the West.”

January 25. Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services, said that the term “terrorist” was too “loaded” to describe the actions of the men who killed 12 people in the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

January 26. It emerged that hospitals across Britain are dealing with at least 15 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) every day, and that the problem is especially acute in Birmingham. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1984, there has not been a single conviction.

January 29. A Sky News investigation into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, a town in South Yorkshire, found that hundreds of new cases continue to emerge. In August 2014, the so-called Alexis Jay Report revealed that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited, mostly by Muslim gangs, and that police and municipal officials failed to tackle the problem because of politically correct concerns over being branded as “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

FEBRUARY 2015

February 4. British police arrested 45 Muslim men on charges of child sex grooming. In Northumbria, 20 suspects appeared in court to face charges including rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking. The alleged offenses involved 12 victims, including one girl aged just 13. In Halifax, West Yorkshire, 25 men were charged with a number of child-related sex offenses.

February 4. The entire cabinet of Rotherham Council resigned after a report found that misplaced political correctness, combined with a culture of denial, allowed more than 1,400 girls to be routinely abused by gangs of Muslim men over a period of 15 years. Children as young as nine were groomed, trafficked and raped by members of the town’s Pakistani community, but fear of being labeled racist meant town councilors turned a blind eye to the abuse.

February 8. More than 1,000 British Muslims protested in central London against what they called “insulting depictions” of the Prophet Mohammed by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Crowds carrying placards with slogans such as “Stand Up For the Prophet” gathered near Prime Minister David Cameron’s office in London’s Whitehall government district. The event was organized by a group called Muslim Action Forum, which is launching a lobbying campaign as well as series of legal challenges in the English court system to establish that depictions of Mohammed are a “hate crime.”

February 25. Asif Masood, 40, an unlicensed drunk driver, apparently three times over the blood alcohol limit when he crashed his friend’s car into a fire hydrant in Nottingham, avoided a prison sentence after he persuaded a judge that he had just rediscovered his Muslim faith and had quit drinking.

February 27. A judge in Liverpool stopped a trial after he discovered that the defendant, Kerim Kurt, had sworn on the Bible and not the Koran. Judge Patrick Thompson of the Liverpool Crown Court said Kurt had taken “an oath to tell the truth which was sworn on the New Testament.” But it later emerged in cross-examination that he was a Muslim. Kurt insisted that he accepted taking the oath on the Bible because “he respected all holy books and wanted to swear on the holy book of the country in which he was residing.” But Judge Thompson said he “took the view that Mr Kurt should have sworn on the Koran as a Muslim.”

MARCH 2015

March 3. A government report found that nearly 400 British girls as young as eleven are believed to have been sexually exploited by Muslim rape gangs in Oxfordshire during the past 15 years. The report charged local officials with repeatedly ignoring the abuse due to a “culture of denial.”

March 7. A leading liberal clergyman, Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s in Waterloo, central London, allowed a full Muslim prayer service to be held in his church. He also asked his congregation to praise “the God that we love, Allah.” It is thought to be the first time an entire Islamic service has been held by the Church of England.

March 11. Reverend Canon Gavin Ashenden, one of the Queen’s chaplains, expressed concern about more than 100 passages in the Koran that “invite people to violence.” He was responding to comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who claimed that young people are turning to jihad because mainstream religion is not “exciting” enough.

March 12. A delegation of prominent British-Egyptians called for the UK government to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood and ban its activities on British soil. The petition said: “Terror knows no borders, and the Muslim Brotherhood and its spin-offs know no mercy, their lust for power, quest for theocracy and desire for domination, make them all blood thirsty, and they will stop at nothing until they bring down civilization — West and East alike.”

March 15. The British government announced that it would not classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

March 20. Newly released figures showed that the population of Muslim inmates in Belmarsh prison — London’s de facto terrorist jail — has more than doubled in just four years. The number of Muslim inmates at the top-security “Category A” prison has jumped by 108% since March 2010, up from 127 to 265 in December 2014. Government data shows in spring 2010, Muslim prisoners made up just 14% of Belmarsh inmates, but fewer than five years later, that proportion had climbed to almost one-third. The proportion of Muslim prisoners in Pentonville prison jumped 40% while that in west London’s Wormwood Scrubs had increased by almost a sixth over the same period.

March 23. A report warned that Muslim women across Britain are being systematically oppressed, abused and discriminated against by Sharia law courts that treat women as second-class citizens. The 40-page report, “A Parallel World: Confronting the Abuse of Many Muslim Women in Britain Today,” was authored by Baroness Caroline Cox, a cross-bench member of the British House of Lords and one of the leading defenders of women’s rights in the UK. The report shows how the increasing influence of Sharia law in Britain today is undermining the fundamental principle that there must be equality for all British citizens under a single law of the land.

APRIL 2015

April 1. Police in Turkey detained nine British nationals from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who were allegedly seeking to join the Islamic State in Syria. The nine — five adults and four children, including a one-year-old baby — were arrested in the Turkish city of Hatay.

One of those arrested was Waheed Ahmed, a student of politics at Manchester University. His father Shakil, a Labour Party councilor in Rochdale, said he thought his son was doing an internship in Birmingham:

“It’s a total mystery to me why he’s there, as I was under the impression he was on a work placement in Birmingham. My son is a good Muslim and his loyalties belong to Britain, so I don’t understand what he’s doing there. If I thought for a second that he was in danger of being radicalised I would have reported him to the authorities.”

April 5. Abase Hussen, the father of a runaway British jihadi schoolgirl, conceded that his daughter may have become radicalized after he took her to an extremist rally organized by the banned Islamist group, Al-Muhajiroun, run by Anjem Choudary, a British-born Muslim later remanded in custody, charged under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Amira, 15, was one of three girls from Bethnal Green Academy in East London who flew to Turkey in February to become “jihadi brides” in Syria. During a hearing at the Home Affairs Select Committee in March, Abase blamed British authorities for failing to stop his daughter from running off to Syria. Asked by Chairman Keith Vaz if Amira had been exposed to any extremism, Hussen replied: “Not at all. Nothing.” The police even issued an apology.

Abase, however, changed his story after a video emerged which unmasked him as an Islamic radical who had marched at an Islamist hate rally alongside Choudary and Michael Adebolajo, the killer of Lee Rigby. Abase, originally from Ethiopia, said he had come to Britain in 1999 “for democracy, for the freedom, for a better life for children, so they could learn English.”

April 5. Victoria Wasteney, 38, a Christian healthcare worker, launched an appeal against an employment tribunal which found she had “bullied” a Muslim colleague by praying for her and inviting her to church. Wasteney was suspended from her job as a senior occupational therapist at the John Howard Centre, a mental health facility in east London, after her colleague, Enya Nawaz, 25, accused Wasteney of trying to convert her to Christianity. Wasteney’s lawyers said that the tribunal broke the law by restricting her freedom of conscience and religion, enshrined in Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

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